Aftermath
by Arashi Yanagawa
Summary: At the end of Akira, we are left with the simple statement, "I am...Tetsuo..." But what does it mean? Aftermath picks up months after the chaos surrounding the teenage boy who escaped from a laboratory-nursery, and is told through the eyes of Miku. R&R!
1. I am Miku

_A…ki…ra..._

_Tet…su…o…_

Those words were all I remember about the dreams I've been having lately. No, more like nightmares. And the headaches; the headaches were more painful than I remembered them being. On top of that, I'd been seeing things. A glass of water moved to the left of where I'd set it, stuffed animals that were in the corner of the room suddenly nowhere to be found. It was all a little bit much more than I could handle. I'd been in this hospital – this nursery – for so long now.

And who were Akira and Tetsuo? I had only heard the names in my head, shortly before the headaches started. There was a Tetsuo mentioned in the news a few months back; an Akira too, but I wasn't sure if those people were the Tetsuo and Akira whose names I'd been hearing in my dreams. Whatever it was, I wasn't ready to think about it in too much depth. I'd have settled for being let out of here first. But I knew that wasn't going to happen; not after one of the senior kids here managed to escape, just to end up nearly getting killed and then disappearing.

It was all over the news for the past few months since it happened. The slaughter of the military and countless civilians. The rumors that some "messiah" had come back and descended on Tokyo, for whatever reason. The massive explosion at the Olympic stadium. It was the talk of late 2019. Heh. Funny that these are the topics on the news, 31 years after World War III. Everything kept pointing back to those two names, though. Akira… Tetsuo… How did they each connect to the massacre? To each other? To me? I hoped there was no real need to ever answer that last question. My head was pounding again, almost like it was reminding me that I was in pain. The door opened, and the nurse walked in, handing me a glass of water and a little cup of pills, which I was told were for keeping the frequency of headaches low. So much for that. I spied the chart held by the nurse, like I needed to tell myself again who I was.

My name is Miku.


	2. Snatch and Run

Chapter 1

I woke up startled, in the middle of the night, after hearing the sounds of what seemed to be a struggle in the hallway outside my room. There were two shots fired, no, three, and my door crashed open. A tall, teenage guy burst in, sweat covered his face and I could see his hands shaking, though something told me it wasn't the first time he'd shot and killed a person. I noticed an emblem in the shape of a pill on his orange leather jacket that denoted him as a member of the nearly-defunct motorcycle gang called The Capsules. He threw me a jacket and a baseball cap, half-screaming at me to be quick about putting them on over my hospital scrubs. Not wanting to fathom having him use that gun on me, I complied in silence, and he yanked me out of the bed by my arm; I complained about it hurting, and he eased up on me a bit.

He said his name was Shotaro Kaneda, and that he was there at the nursery to rescue me; I wasn't sure from what, though. I was having trouble keeping up as he gripped my arm, running out a back entrance to the building and through dimly lit side streets; my short legs were burning with every step I forced from myself. Dammit! What a jerk, making me - a kid - run like this, lest we forget my status as a girl in less than peak condition. If I could have, I would have hit him in the gut for that. Behind us came the footfalls and shouts from armed guards, apparently under orders to take out Kaneda and get me back from him. A shot was fired, and it whizzed past my head, nearly hitting Kaneda in the forearm. He threw himself down and rolled into drawing his gun, firing a shot that hit one of the guards in the jaw. I could see the crimson blood pouring from his face as he died; my stomach was churning and the familiar twinge of a headache had set in on me. This was not the kind of thing somebody like me needed to see at my age, or at any age. The headache was so strong, all I remember after that was silence. Silence and darkness.

_Is she okay?_

_Kaneda, I'm not sure she's doing so hot._

_Dammit, be quiet! I can't concentrate with you yappin' every minute!_

_Come on, open your eyes. There now…everything's all right._

My eyes opened slowly and focused even slower, as I turned my head to see Kaneda wringing water from a rag before bringing it over to wipe my forehead. When he took it off, it was stained red. I must have taken a fall and hurt myself pretty badly to end up with this guy as a caretaker. To his left was another older boy, who seemed kind of jumpy about something, though I wasn't certain what. Clearly, he was a dork; anybody who wears a tie like that and shoes like those had to be a dork. I laughed softly, trying to regulate my breathing a bit. I overheard Kaneda call him "Kai," so I guess that was the hyperactive dork's name. Kai muttered something about Espers, and I wondered what an "Esper" even was. And then, one of those names that I'd been hearing in my dreams so often had decided to pop up in my head again. Tetsuo. Kai was talking as fast he could to Kaneda, about Tetsuo and about the massacre a few months ago; asking if Kaneda was sure about this – whatever _this_ was – and if I was "like Tetsuo." Kaneda didn't answer the last question; simply, he dismissed Kai with a menial task.

Kaneda looked over at me and asked if I was okay, I nodded. He told me he was going to explain what was going on the best way he could, and that he'd start a few months back. A few months before the massacre happened. I sat up slowly, gingerly touching the spot on my head where I'd been bandaged up, ready to listen. Apparently, it had all started one night when the Capsules fought another biker gang, the Clowns, out on the highway. The fight intensified, and the Clowns took off running when the police showed up. Kaneda's gang had chased them into the old city and were siphoning off the Clowns' guys fairly easily. A sudden crash and an explosion caught the Capsules off guard, most of all Kaneda. He was nervous that the victim could have been a close friend of his, another Capsules gang kid by the name of Tetsuo Shima. Thankfully it hadn't been, but there was no answer about the significance of that small child.

So now I had an answer to one thing; I knew of Tetsuo, but still didn't know _about_ him, or why I was hearing his name in my dreams. Kaneda went on to explain that the Capsules were arrested by the military and its leader, Colonel Shikishima, under suspicion that they had something to do with the kidnapping of the child, a boy by the name of Takashi. Handcuffed and assaulted, all he and his friends could do was watch as the military stole away in a helicopter with Tetsuo and Takashi in tow. His face seemed to grow more solemn and he paused, getting up to leave the room for a moment. He was trying to talk quietly, but I knew he didn't really know how.

_She's pretty banged up. That header into the street she took when I almost got shot really did a number on her. Poor kid. They've had her locked up in that friggin' baby room, from the looks of her, but not long enough for her to end up like those kids. Or…like Tetsuo._

_Should I go get Kei and bring her to meet the kid, just in case? Better safe than sorry with stuff like this, man. We don't really know what this could snowball into just yet._


	3. Medium

Chapter 2

I had rested for a few hours, and was finally well enough to move around, by Kaneda's standards. He'd made sure I ate well and had changed the bandage on my head; he said it looked like the gash was healing better than he expected. Deciding to continue with the story he was telling earlier, Kaneda went on to explain that Tetsuo had become a subject of testing under the watchful eye of Colonel Shikishima and the Doctor, much in the same way that Takashi had. Apparently, there were two other child test subjects with Takashi, Kiyoko and Masaru. In addition to them, he explained, was Akira. These children, Akira and the others, were the "Espers," a group of youths with psychic powers. The Colonel had taken Tetsuo Shima in an effort to gauge how powerful he was in comparison to Akira. But Akira had been dead for some time, as of the moment Kaneda had attempted to rescue Tetsuo. Tetsuo had gotten into some kind of battle with the Espers, during the latter part of which he had determined what he assumed was Akira's location. And then, Tetsuo was gone, leaving only the Espers, Colonel Shikishima and his men, Kaneda and…

_Kaneda! Did you get the girl? Is she all right?_

_Yeah, yeah, she's here and she's fine. Friggin' relax would ya? Jeez…_

The girl sat in front of me, her eyes brown and glimmering and locked onto my own. She explained that she was Kei, Kaneda's girlfriend and a medium. What would Kaneda need me to meet a medium for? The whole thing sounded like bullshit, to be frank. Secret military testing for psychic kids, mediums, Akira. It was all a bunch of damn lies. Kei explained that Kaneda had come to get me as a means of preventing Shikishima and his Doctor from running the same battery of tests on me that had been done on the Espers. Apparently, she knew they were a step too late in reaching me, though, as one look in my eyes told her that I had already started taking the pills that were supposed to help suppress my latent psychic abilities.

She lifted a locked metal box from the floor and set it between us. Kei stated that the power that Akira, the Espers, and subsequently, Tetsuo had exists in everyone from the start, and that the key was wisely choosing how to use it after you had learned how. Kaneda and Kai had put the call out to her because they intended on testing and gauging my power, then training me to use it, so that there could be a person who could fight Tetsuo on his own level, should he decide to come back after his long absence. I nodded in silence, which was not to say that I had begun to fall in for this line of shit they were trying to feed me. Were they all on crack? Was I really supposed to believe that A – if Tetsuo even existed, he would come back and B – I was going to be trained to use "latent psychic ability" in order to fight him? Yeah, right. Damn idiots.

I looked from Kei, to Kaneda and back as Kei told me to focus on the contents inside the box, keep the images I was getting of them in my mind, and then write down on a sheet of paper exactly what these items were. I decided to humor her and go through with it, faking my way through and writing simply three words on the sheet of paper in front of me: _block, car, lighter._ Kei unlocked the box and lifted the lid after I'd shown her what I wrote, and pulled from the heavy metal container a wooden block, a toy car and a red cigarette lighter. No way. No _fucking_ way! She faked it, she had to have. The box was rigged somehow or another. It had to be a trick.

_Kaneda, get me the three small metal rings on the table near you. Bring them here and put them on the table._

Kaneda did as Kei asked him, and leaned against the wall as if bored by the process. This test, Kei explained, was to determine the scope of my telepathic power, if there was indeed, any. I was to lift and move the rings without the use of my hands, or so I had come to understand it. I was ready to humor her again and set a look of concentration on my face as I watched closely to try and see where the filament wire was tied onto the objects. Without warning, the rings rose slowly from the table. Playing along with the bit, I said to myself, _left_, and as expected, someone had moved the wires on the rings so that the rings moved left. A pause, and then I remembered that only Kaneda was in the room with us; Kai had gone out once Kei had gotten here. Near as I could tell, there was nothing that Kaneda was moving, but this had to be some kind of joke, it HAD to be. How the fuck could a person lift metal rings and move them without their hands or wires, and how were the contents of that solid metal box _exactly_ what I had guessed, as a joke?

_Have you told her about what happened at the Olympic construction site?_

_Yeah, I was getting' to it, and then you showed up with that damn test kit of yours. You want to hurry it up already, Kei? Kinda boring just sittin' here watching you do your medium gig._

Kei gave an apologetic wave of her hand and took to silence as I looked again from her to Kaneda. He exhaled with a façade of impatience set on his features; I noticed he was pretty cute once you got past his shit attitude, but that's another story. Colonel Shikishima had followed Tetsuo to the Olympic construction site in the old city, and Kaneda had followed the Colonel. The Espers had made their way to where Testuo was, also. It was the Colonel who had first tried to combat Tetsuo and his raging powers, but to little avail. Kaneda had shown up after that, attacking Tetsuo with a military laser weapon that he'd picked up from a corpse left in Tetsuo's wake. The fight went steadily between them, neither wavering or conceding to the other in the slightest, and then the unimaginable had begun. _Then_ it happened? This whole fucking thing was god damn unimaginable, if you ask me. But whatever, let him talk. He kept going, telling me of how he had seen, with his own eyes, his once closest friend mutating into a grotesque form, resembling a giant infant. Every bit was undulating, as if reaching out for help, and then, the light.

The Espers had summoned Akira, in an attempt to help prevent further chaos from spilling out into Neo-Tokyo. Akira descended, and enveloped everything in a bright, white light. Kaneda told me of how, when it appeared, he saw nothing, but was suddenly struck with glimpses of Tetsuo's dreams and memories: being brought to the orphanage for the first time; meeting Kaneda; all of the capsules being out on their bikes, just for the hell of it. He also told me that he had gotten a glimpse of Akira's memories, though many, if not all of them, were of the tests he and the other Espers were subjected to by Colonel Shikishima and the Doctor. He had come out of his state of unconsciousness outside the old city, with Kei and Kai beside him. Their motorcycles were in bad condition, but usable, and the three of them rode off, in no particular direction. The Colonel was nowhere to be found, and the same could be said for Akira, the Espers and Tetsuo. But something told him, he said to me, that that moment was not the last time he would see the boy who was, at one point in time, the closest friend he had in the world.


End file.
